Mario Carreño: selected works (1936-1957):

The publication, a joint endeavor of the museum and Miami’s Torna & Prado Fine Art Collection, headed by the researcher Jesús Fernández Torna, who is the author of the anthology, was launched at an event held at the museum and attended by its director, Moraima Clavijo Colón, who emphasized the fact that this copious material spanning thirty years of the artist’s life and career, was a “pending chapter in Cuban fine arts.” Also among the participants were MNBA staff members who collaborated with their essays to this revealing study on Carreño’s life and oeuvre: Luz Merino Acosta, assistant technical director; Roberto Cobas Amate, curator of the Cuban Avant-garde section; and Elsa Vega Dopico, curator of the Art of the 1950s section.

Other participants included the journalist Jorge Rivas Rodríguez, who was the author of another essay, and critic Pablo Pérez-Cisneros, the son of Guy Pérez-Cisneros, who contributed a historical text on Carreño written by his father and included in this indispensable reference book, designed and edited by the art historian Guillermo “Willy” Castellanos Simmons.

In his commentary, Fernando Rodríguez Sosa highlighted, among the values of this “monumental work”, the research carried out by Fernández Torna, his painstaking checking of data, as well as the “impeccable facture” that made it possible to present a book that has not only become an obligatory reference but that is also aesthetically beautiful.

As emphasized in the back cover of Mario Carreño: obras selectas (1936-1957 ), the book illustrates the trajectory of an artist whose point of departure is the legacy of the Renaissance, and who embarks on a search for Latin American art at a time that was crucial for the construction of an identity. But in particular, it shines a light on Carreño´s adherence to an epoch in which, as he himself wrote, “everything tended towards the square.”

Jesús Fernández Torna’s extensive essay reveals a thorough investigation of Carreño´s biographical data, allowing for the rectification of information coined in an imprecise way by art history. Thus he verifies that the artist’s date of birth is May 24 and not June 24, and that his wedding to art promoter María Luisa Mena did not take place in 1942 in Mexico, as it had been stated, but in 1941 in Havana. The book includes numerous details of the time − like the description of Alfred Bar Jr.’s first visit to Havana in 1942 and not two years later, as it was generally thought − or clarifications of the exact date of works, and an unprecedented reconstruction of his family life, including details of the lives of his eight siblings and his half-sister, as well as never-before-seen photographic documents.

Merino Acosta retrieves Carreño’s beginnings as an illustrator for the newspaper Diario de la Marina in Havana or for Rafael Alberti’s Octubre magazine in Madrid, as well as his graphic design work for the New York magazine Norte, and the way in which, living in Chile, his yearning for the Caribbean led him to create Antillanas, “an excellent combination of the different trends in his drawing”, which contained the seeds of many of his later works. She highlights the fact that, parallel to his work as an art critic, Carreño taught people to appreciate works of concrete art and promoted works such as those of Sandú Darié.

Cobas Amate, who “had the pleasure of meeting Carreño when he was a child,” recreates the importance of the master’s Mexican period when he was already a painter, his training in Paris, in contact with modern painting, and the fruitful New York period, when he created works such as El descubrimiento de las Antillas and Nacimiento de las naciones americanas, allegories of the origin of the continent. On his return to Cuba, Carreño pictorially rediscovered life in the tropics through elements of popular iconography. The year 1943, the same year in which Lam painted La jungla, is the date of the execution of the iconic pieces in Duco paint following the technique he had learned from Siqueiros: Cortadores de caña; Fuego en el batey or Danza afrocubana. The essay retraces the gradual shift towards an abstract morphology in the 1951 paintings − such as Papalotes and Saludos al mar Caribe − which confirm the importance of the Cuban years in his painting.

Dopico inquires into the way in which Carreño moved towards a “geometricizing order”, a tendency he had particularly appreciated during his trip to countries like Argentina, and which marked the emergence of abstract works such as Mediodía lunar, with which he participated in the 1953 Sao Paulo Biennial, and in the historical exhibition at Havana’s Lyceum, which would become known as The Anti-Biennial. Also noteworthy are texts such as La pintura abstracta, or the presentation of the exhibition Carreño 1950-1957, which included works such as Tensión espacial or Elegía a la diagonal.

Rivas, in turn, revisits Carreño’s concrete oeuvre, delving into the history of abstraction in Cuba and into its relationship with the different art movements in the world, as well as into the artist’s endeavor to take the sense of the visual arts further in order to develop a new sensibility in the human being, since − as perceived by the critic Rafael Marquina − for Carreño painting was not a “mere creative exercise”, but rather, a way of providing a structure to the present.

He also records the resistance with which abstract geometric art was confronted in the island as of the 1960s, a fact that endows the launching of Mario Carreño: obras selectas (1936-1957 ) with an additional value for the history of art, which is permanently under construction.